The “crummy” decade that Paul McCartney blocked out of his memory
Not every musician can have a perfect track record when they’re making hits. Some albums are meant for the bargain bins every now and again, but for a musician like Paul McCartney, it’s absolutely insane for him to think that there were entire sections of his career that he closed himself off from for so many years.
Then again, life in the spotlight for that long is always going to be a bit of a tricky tightrope to walk. Macca has been spending his entire life doing press for whatever record he has out or working on a new album half the time, and since he keeps himself busy so often, there are many times where he felt that his entire life story was getting editorialised a bit too much behind the scenes.
I mean, think about the first handful of years that he spent with The Beatles compared to their last days working together in the 1970s. Not much may have changed, and the band members could still be cordial with each other, but compared to every other thing they were working on, you would have sworn that reporters were seeing a band go through the musical equivalent of an ugly divorce half the time. But no one felt those repercussions more than McCartney.
The entire story of the band’s demise started to paint him as the villain during their final days. After all, he was the one who announced that the band was done, and since critics weren’t taking kindly to his solo ventures or his initial offerings with Wings, it wasn’t like people were lining up to see him for his artistic merit. It seemed like his time had faded, but something changed around the time of Band on the Run.
People had finally started to see the old version of Macca that they had known for all those years, and while the stadium-rock angle might not have given him as much credibility as he did back in the day, he was still selling in droves and sounding as good as ever if Wings Over America is any indication. But McCartney later claimed that most of his fond memories of his music come from well after his stadium-rock era.
For him, any music that he created directly after The Beatles felt like a shoddy attempt to sound like his old group, saying, “I almost don’t remember the 1970s. I was so insecure. It’s like a big blank for me. I think I tended to go along with a lot of the critics and stuff. My opinion was I was good in The Beatles, I was crummy then, and now I’m doing one or two things that are alright.” But even if he thought that way for a long time, he was way off in thinking that everything was fluff.
Sure, Wings had their fair share of odd moments compared to everyone else, but McCartney was never afraid to make something that was objectively great. Despite its clubbing back in the day, RAM is among the finest albums that he ever recorded, and even when he reached the very end of the decade, hearing him get even more experimental on McCartney II helped open doors for people to make wild electronic sounds on their own.
There would always be critics that were willing to prop up people like John Lennon and ignore virtually everything that McCartney did in the 1970s, but now that time has smiled on ‘The Cute One’s output, it seems like a lot of his work with Wings has seen one of the best reappraisals he could have asked for.
